One of the myths that makes life in our time so tiresome is the notion that differences in personality traits and abilities between men and women are caused by differences in upbringing. Supposedly, they arise because girls are treated differently from boys from early childhood, are exposed to different kinds of stimuli, and so forth. Thus, if boys are given dolls and girls toy cars, the differences are supposedly meant to disappear—or at least diminish.
As usual, it began with a perfectly interesting hypothesis that simply turned out to be wrong. There would be nothing terrible about that. Investigating false hypotheses is part of any honest search for knowledge. But occasionally a false hypothesis fits neatly into a political program. A group of people becomes attached to it, begins adjusting its perception of the world accordingly, and starts ignoring anything that might call it into question. In this case, studies showing differences in the responses of male and female infants within the first few days after birth are conspicuously ignored. So, of course, is the fact that in regions such as Scandinavia, where social differences between men and women are supposedly smallest, differences in psychological traits and abilities are among the largest.
Evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams recently offered another devastating argument. (See his discussion here.) The existence of homosexual men, that is, men who exhibit a number of traits more typical of women—high empathy, lower mathematical ability, certain forms of heightened sensitivity, poorer spatial ability, better verbal ability, and so forth—contradicts the feminist account. In their case, it is fundamentally impossible for these traits to be the result of upbringing. When a boy is one or three years old, nobody knows that he will grow up to be homosexual. He therefore receives an entirely ordinary upbringing for a boy. He is given toy cars and soldiers to play with, not dolls. Yet his brain nevertheless develops in ways that are more typically female than male.
We therefore have a third compelling reason why differences between men and women cannot be caused by upbringing. If upbringing plays any role at all, it is a thoroughly marginal one. And what do you think? Will researchers at gender-studies institutes change their minds? Or will those fanatics whom Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš threw out of various human-rights councils, where they had been shaping government policy, change theirs?